Substructural control of fuzzy nonlinear flexible structures

It is advantageous to use the substructural and/or decentralized techniques in structural control to save on computations and time. In this paper, a generalized substructural approach is presented in the control of fuzzy nonlinear flexible structures with discrete sensors/actuators. The substructural control scheme is developed using the static condensation technique together with the LQG control method. The subcontrollers and subobservers designed at substructure levels are used to assemble the global controller and observer for the whole structure. Nonlinear effects are included in the structural formulations and a fuzzy methodology is adopted for handling the imprecision present in the structure modeling. The nonlinear and fuzzy schemes are applied to one structural control problem to illustrate the accuracy and capability of the substructural control technique.